What’s The Differences Between Magento 1 and Magento 2 ?

Magento is the most popular open source platform. Releasing from 2008, Magento 1 provides many versions that serve different objects. In order to improve features of the leading eCommerce platform, Magento team continues to develop Magento 2. On November 2015, Magento 2 is released to the Magento community. It is the next generation open source platform that is faster, easier and more secure than Magento 1. It is available for download both versions at https://magento.com/

In this article, LitExtension will share the points we know about some differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2. If you want to upgrade to this version of Magento, I think you might find many helpful information after reading this article.

1. New File Structure

With Magento 2, everything is placed directly under the “app” structure, except for config.xml. It is easy for you to access all templates, layouts and js, css file. It gives developers more opportunities for customization without changing site functionality.

2. New Built-in Technologies Under The Hood.

Magento 1

Magento 2

Sass/Compass

HTML5

Prototype JavaScript library in core

CSS3

Jquery in rwd package

RequireJS

Additional JavaScript libraries

Apache 2.2 or later

HTML5/ CSS3

PHP 5.5.x

PSR Compliance

Install needed components via Composer

Magento UI library

CSS Pre-processor

Full page caching

Magento performance toolkit

Dependency Injection

3. Reduce upgrade costs and efforts

Magento 2 allows you to install and upgrade core software and extensions quickly and simply with lower upgrade costs and efforts. It includes information on versioning policies, so developers can upgrade to new version easier. However, you need the support of new standalone installer to set up Magento 2 faster.

4. Improved Performance and Scalability

The new default indexers in Magento 2 allows you to improve speed of query performance with more efficient updates. Magento performance toolkit is the key to optimize system performance. Developer can create test environments and set up automated test easily. Moreover, Magento 2 integrated with Varnish Cache to reduce server load and speed up the page load.

5. jQuery Library

Prototype is the main JavaScript Library in Magento CE 1.7 – 1.9 and EE 1.11 – 1.14, which targets to ease development of dynamic web applications. The demand from Magento Community rises, jQuery becomes the new default JavaScript library.

6. What are risks of migrating to Magento 2?

6.1 Weak Community

Magento 2 inherited large community from Magento 1. However, many developers and experts are continuing to research and learn about it after a month of releasing. The previous communities are huge but they need time to become strong communities for Magento 2.

6.2 Command line

Magento 1 focuses on graphical user interface (GUI) with easy customization. GUI do not require complicated commands, so it is available for a beginner. GUI allow users to navigate through a system. You should get the benefits of WYSIWYG. It makes Magento be user-friendly. On the other hand, Magento 2 uses mainly Command Line. The command line has a big number of commands. It has a steep learning curve to cause many difficulties for new users without any experience to experienced users.

6.3 Extensions

The number of extension for Magento 2 is still limited in comparison with Magento 1. Most companies have to pay third party to install Magento extensions properly from essential extensions to advanced extensions.

According to statistics of LitExtension, on average Magento 2 migration is about 20% larger than a store upgrade between two versions of Magento 1. If you have plan to upgrade to this version of Magento, you can do with Magento to Magento migration tool .

Since 2011, I founded LitExtension Solutions offering shopping cart migration service including Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify,... LitExtension has been the leading provider of automated Shopping Cart Migration Service in the world with more than 20,000 global customers and we have delivered 30,000+ successful migrations to our customers over the past 5 years.